Gastric cancer incidence rate to rise

By the end of 2020, the incidence of gastric cancer (cancer of the stomach) is expected to rise about 13 percent — reaching 250,400 cases in seven countries — the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. That’s the forecast provided by Datamonitor, a business information and analysis company.

For the United States, the company predicts about 27,000 incident cases in 2010, accounting for 12 percent of all cases in the seven countries. That number is expected to rise to 18 percent by 2020.

Among patients with known tumor characteristics, 90.3 percent of stomach cancers were adenocarcinomas; gastrointestinal stromal tumors accounted for 3.4 percent. Approximately 62 percent of stomach cancers were diagnosed at the regional or distant stage, with women having greater percentages of localized stage cancer than men (24.8 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively). Approximately 50 percent of stomach cancers were poorly differentiated.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stomach cancer rates in 2004 were highest among men in the Northeast (11.7 percent) and lowest in the Midwest and South (9.0 percent). Rates among women were highest in the Northeast (5.6 percent) and lowest in the Midwest (3.9 percent). Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York had some of the highest rates of stomach cancer among men (10.2–18.4 percent) and women (5.1–6.7 percent).